Before the evening began, it had all the hallmarks of a night of a thousand gay stars. Every once in a while, the planets line up and all sorts of people who are difficult to wrangle suddenly start to coalesce. Even my roommate Mike, who hates going out in general, but even more hates going out to the kinds of places I end up in, agreed to go. And so it went, and within hours, a magical night took form. Tonight was the night and its ground zero looked like the cabanas at The Maritime.
I went to the cabanas last Friday with Matty and Hanno for Zoe's birthday party and expected the same crowd of narrow ties and wide smiles we experienced last time. But more importantly, I expected Matty and Hanno. After all, we had talked about it the night before at Rob and Erik's pretty boy bacchanal, and they had even dutifully RSVP'd on Facebook to Will Wikle's birthday invite. But as I left the show, I noticed they had changed their Facebook status to include a reference to the movie Doubt. Okay, I thought, so after a few hours of the luminous Meryl chewing scenery, they will make their grand entrance up the stairs.
After the show, I walked out with Romaine, passed The Amazing Race's Nick Spangler leaving The Fantasticks, and then headed on the 1 train down to Chelsea. Roommate was still at his office birthday party so I had some time to kill and joined Cyd and Dan for one of their last remaining nights at their tasteful sublet before they make the big move to Los Angeles later this month. They were cocktailing with a couple, both named Matt, which made it so much easier to remember both of their names, even after the white cranberry juice and vodka cocktail that Cyd made for me. Despite not having a solid penny to my name, I impressed them with my theoretical investment strategies. Must have been the alcohol. For all I really know about making money, I might as well have declared at the end that I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express last night.
Mike arrived at the cabanas so I gave Cyd and Dan a long quick hug good bye and headed a few blocks down to the Maritime. By now it was almost 11:30 and I expected a line. However, there was no one waiting outside and the coat check was a sea of empty hangers. This was a bad sign. Upstairs the party was small but the music was loud. I found Mike quickly, wearing a cute zip neck pullover and a tie. He looked like all the other cute, preppy gays at the party! I felt so alone in my v-neck Otter Fashion shirt, though I have created an empowering take on my outsider fashion lately where I imagine myself a misunderstood trendsetter who is just too far ahead on the curve for people to even see around it yet.
Suddenly, it seemed like I was surrounded by everyone I knew exclusively through Matty. First, it was Brian Babst who demanded my cell phone number. "I wanted to text you the other day," he started, but I finished his sentence for him with "but you realized you didn't have my number." He plugged every detail of my personal life into his Blackberry, even scheduling a time slot later this week to send me his fabulous new holiday card, which I have to say was a very sweet touch. I was flattered.
Then I ran into Young Bradford (and later Ben appeared to complete the Benford set), who was rocking lederhosen. I thought it was an homage to Hanno, but he yelled "Swiss Miss" over the music and after some coordinated Alpine dance moves, we left it at that. Moments later, an outrageously tall and old drag queen wandered into us, her ill-fitting wig a sneeze away from resting inside her champagne flute. "Elaine Stritch in drag!" I declared but Bradford shook his head. "No. No. That's definitely Melanie Griffith." As she neared even nearer, I said, "Hello Melanie" and she went off on me in a drunken rage, alternately sloshing her drink and tugging on her errant wig. "Have some of my roofie" she smiled as she poured some of her drink into my cocktail before trotting away, one broken heel in front of the other.
Ben Harvey was there, fresh from his trip to London, along with his kissing cousin Christian and Christian's main squeeze Jimmie. Dave Rubin was with them, his square-jawed sexiness firmly in place. I coaxed Mike against his will into being social and hanging out with them and it all went swimmingly. I was still expecting Matty, but when he finally texted me back, it was to say that he and the Austrian were cuddling back at his place. So, to show him what he was missing, I decided to run around the cabanas and take pictures with all the people there that he knew. After all, why should Michael Musto, as always lurking in the shadows of joy, have all the fun?
I dashed around the increasingly packed bar and implored strangers to snap my photo. There was Ryan Newman, so much more fun without his boyfriend. In my attempt to get a photo with birthday boy Will Wikle, I ran smack into that hot slice of man Matt Kugelman. There is something wrong with him because he gets better looking every time I see him. It's a problem. Will was busy twirling up a storm to Get Me Bodied followed IMMEDIATELY by Single Ladies, so I gave his sweaty hunched back a hug as he down pointed his way across the dance floor. As much fun as imagining him in a black leotard is, I can't miss my train and had to make a run for it. Though I did take a second at the top of the stairs to lead the just arrived hot gay comic Shawn Hollenbach in the general direction of Dave Rubin. Always happy to help a boy scout across the street!
It will be sad to think of Manhattan without Cyd and Dan in it, even though I can add them to the growing list of people I don't have time to see on my annual short weekends in Los Angeles. And I have seen so much of Matty this year, more than I have seen him in all the years I have lived here, that I suppose having a single night off won't kill me. True, not having the friends you love around you is hard sometimes. But as the windows steamed up inside the cabanas and the $12 cocktails flowed, the party continues anyway, and we can all still have a good time.
Showing posts with label Matt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Matt. Show all posts
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Sunday, September 14, 2008
XES Farce
Conventional wisdom says that when you are having a hard time getting over someone, you should have sex with lots of hot people. It doesn't really work, but hot sex with hot people is always preferable to being depressed at home. Or so it would seem. It was not my intention to try out this theory last night, but when you wander down to Chelsea for drinks with the boys, these sorts of things are bound to happen.
It all started innocently enough with Judge David Young, who was in town to tape episodes of his hit daytime show, asking to hang out a bit this weekend. We both wanted to see The Women, despite our misgivings about updating a classic (and why Diane English instead of say Nancy Meyers or Nora Ephron or even Elaine May). So I plotted an early show followed by dinner and then some drinks and invited my neighbor Clayton to join us.
We went to Kips Bay to see the film, which is J's old theatre before he moved to Brooklyn last month. He is right that it, among most Manhattan movie theatres, has a minimum of loud teen rowdiness and cell phone interruptions. Bargain basement expectations helped the medicine go down and we all ended up liking The Women overall (as I explained to David's husband Scott over the phone afterward, if you forget that it is a remake and don't spend the whole movie longing for Paulette Goddard to beat the stuffing out of Rosiland Russell in Reno, you will like it much better).
From there we decamped to the Dallas BBQ in Chelsea which was a new place for me (I am still trying to do new things), though I don't know how I feel about a restaurant that has a bouncer. This might explain why when I texted Matt Kelleher to tell him we were there for dinner he responded "God why?" The food was delicious and cheap, which are my two favorite things in a food item, but the atmosphere, especially in the basement party room where we were seated, had the feeling of a stripped down Chuck E. Cheese where the cardboard pizza and skeeball had been replaced with messy ribs and outlandish day-glo frozen cocktails.
After dinner, Clayton ran off to his previously set date to see a band perform and David and I wandered over to Barracuda. At ten p.m. it looked like a pre-Palin McCain rally, though I assured David that in an hour, it would be too crowded to move or breathe. Aside from a guy in a muscle tee basically masturbating at the urinal next to me, the most exciting thing to happen there was running once again into adorable Matt, from Tuesday's ill-fated adventure out at Bowery Bar. He was there with his co-worker Chip and the four of us had a great time, with me embarrassing myself once again with my completely inappropriate jokes comparing Caylee Anthony to a tire iron (I will spare you the sordid punchline).
David left around Midnight and then the rest of us parted ways soon afterward when Barracuda suddenly became unbearably hot. I think the air conditioning must have broken but that is always the way with that bar. In the summer, the a/c breaks or in the winter, the heat goes off, or a sewer pipe bursts and the whole thing smells like shit. Personally I think the owners like to close early so on nights when they think they have made enough money, they just wreak havoc on the environment and wait for the animals to migrate elsewhere.
To make a long blog posting short, I met up with Clayton at XES where he had landed after the band cancelled their show and while there met a hot but very drunk guy named Steven and his even more intoxicated roommate Brad, with whom Clayton had shared some previous dates. Even though he couldn't remember my name all four times I told him, Steven insisted that I go home with him. All the warning signs told me to leave with Clayton and return to the suburbs but a desire to assuage the overwhelming sadness I have with not being with J encouraged me into a harrowing cab ride out to the wilds of Brooklyn.
That Steven was cute with a hot body and lived in J's new neighborhood seemed like just the kind of revenge fuck that drunken four a.m. bragging phone calls are made for. But crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, Steven tossed the half full glass of vodka which he snuck out of the bar out the open window just barely missing my face and for a moment I seriously considered leaping out after it. Their cute apartment was in a terrifying neighborhood and I began plotting my escape, mapping in my head the fastest route on foot to the L train even before my shoes hit the pavement outside the apartment building.
Their mutual friend Davis came along, to sleep on the couch for some reason. Brad stripped down to his underwear and drunk dialed Clayton to come over and have sex with him. It didn't work much to my chagrin since I hoped it would make my eminent escape easier. Moments later, we all went to our separate sleeping arrangements and Steven started in on me in earnest. Steven likes it rough so in order to get me to force myself on him, he got quite violent with me. The story he told back at the bar about showing up at work once with a black eye suddenly became very clear, like my brain flooding with harsh fluorescent lighting. Finally I just decided that despite my intense irritation at that point as long as he had an orgasm he could fall asleep and I could get out of there. It took fucking forever, probably an hour, which was easily 58 minutes after I stopped trying to have an orgasm myself.
A little after six, with dawn creeping through the window and Brad snoring away throughout the apartment, I gathered my clothes and made my escape. While waiting on the hellish humid stinking L train platform I had a lot of time to think about everything. I miss J every single day, and it is like trying to catch your breath at high altitudes. It is exhausting and I just long for the ease of life before I climbed that mountain. But I just can't penetrate that wall of his that surrounds him, make him understand that my love for him is real and intense and permanent. In my mind's eye, his blue eyes starring back at me are as black as a moonless night, my journey into them perilous and fruitless . In both versions of The Women, Mary Haines stands her ground for L'Amore, L'Amore, but celluloid lives can't convey how lonely that stand truly is. And in my heart I know it will never work for me. There is no happy ending in my grudge match between the irresistible force and the immovable object. There is nothing in those robust eyes of his for me and there probably never will be.
It all started innocently enough with Judge David Young, who was in town to tape episodes of his hit daytime show, asking to hang out a bit this weekend. We both wanted to see The Women, despite our misgivings about updating a classic (and why Diane English instead of say Nancy Meyers or Nora Ephron or even Elaine May). So I plotted an early show followed by dinner and then some drinks and invited my neighbor Clayton to join us.
We went to Kips Bay to see the film, which is J's old theatre before he moved to Brooklyn last month. He is right that it, among most Manhattan movie theatres, has a minimum of loud teen rowdiness and cell phone interruptions. Bargain basement expectations helped the medicine go down and we all ended up liking The Women overall (as I explained to David's husband Scott over the phone afterward, if you forget that it is a remake and don't spend the whole movie longing for Paulette Goddard to beat the stuffing out of Rosiland Russell in Reno, you will like it much better).
From there we decamped to the Dallas BBQ in Chelsea which was a new place for me (I am still trying to do new things), though I don't know how I feel about a restaurant that has a bouncer. This might explain why when I texted Matt Kelleher to tell him we were there for dinner he responded "God why?" The food was delicious and cheap, which are my two favorite things in a food item, but the atmosphere, especially in the basement party room where we were seated, had the feeling of a stripped down Chuck E. Cheese where the cardboard pizza and skeeball had been replaced with messy ribs and outlandish day-glo frozen cocktails.
After dinner, Clayton ran off to his previously set date to see a band perform and David and I wandered over to Barracuda. At ten p.m. it looked like a pre-Palin McCain rally, though I assured David that in an hour, it would be too crowded to move or breathe. Aside from a guy in a muscle tee basically masturbating at the urinal next to me, the most exciting thing to happen there was running once again into adorable Matt, from Tuesday's ill-fated adventure out at Bowery Bar. He was there with his co-worker Chip and the four of us had a great time, with me embarrassing myself once again with my completely inappropriate jokes comparing Caylee Anthony to a tire iron (I will spare you the sordid punchline).
David left around Midnight and then the rest of us parted ways soon afterward when Barracuda suddenly became unbearably hot. I think the air conditioning must have broken but that is always the way with that bar. In the summer, the a/c breaks or in the winter, the heat goes off, or a sewer pipe bursts and the whole thing smells like shit. Personally I think the owners like to close early so on nights when they think they have made enough money, they just wreak havoc on the environment and wait for the animals to migrate elsewhere.
To make a long blog posting short, I met up with Clayton at XES where he had landed after the band cancelled their show and while there met a hot but very drunk guy named Steven and his even more intoxicated roommate Brad, with whom Clayton had shared some previous dates. Even though he couldn't remember my name all four times I told him, Steven insisted that I go home with him. All the warning signs told me to leave with Clayton and return to the suburbs but a desire to assuage the overwhelming sadness I have with not being with J encouraged me into a harrowing cab ride out to the wilds of Brooklyn.
That Steven was cute with a hot body and lived in J's new neighborhood seemed like just the kind of revenge fuck that drunken four a.m. bragging phone calls are made for. But crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, Steven tossed the half full glass of vodka which he snuck out of the bar out the open window just barely missing my face and for a moment I seriously considered leaping out after it. Their cute apartment was in a terrifying neighborhood and I began plotting my escape, mapping in my head the fastest route on foot to the L train even before my shoes hit the pavement outside the apartment building.
Their mutual friend Davis came along, to sleep on the couch for some reason. Brad stripped down to his underwear and drunk dialed Clayton to come over and have sex with him. It didn't work much to my chagrin since I hoped it would make my eminent escape easier. Moments later, we all went to our separate sleeping arrangements and Steven started in on me in earnest. Steven likes it rough so in order to get me to force myself on him, he got quite violent with me. The story he told back at the bar about showing up at work once with a black eye suddenly became very clear, like my brain flooding with harsh fluorescent lighting. Finally I just decided that despite my intense irritation at that point as long as he had an orgasm he could fall asleep and I could get out of there. It took fucking forever, probably an hour, which was easily 58 minutes after I stopped trying to have an orgasm myself.
A little after six, with dawn creeping through the window and Brad snoring away throughout the apartment, I gathered my clothes and made my escape. While waiting on the hellish humid stinking L train platform I had a lot of time to think about everything. I miss J every single day, and it is like trying to catch your breath at high altitudes. It is exhausting and I just long for the ease of life before I climbed that mountain. But I just can't penetrate that wall of his that surrounds him, make him understand that my love for him is real and intense and permanent. In my mind's eye, his blue eyes starring back at me are as black as a moonless night, my journey into them perilous and fruitless . In both versions of The Women, Mary Haines stands her ground for L'Amore, L'Amore, but celluloid lives can't convey how lonely that stand truly is. And in my heart I know it will never work for me. There is no happy ending in my grudge match between the irresistible force and the immovable object. There is nothing in those robust eyes of his for me and there probably never will be.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)